Various techniques and apparatus have been developed and used for protein and for DNA diagnostic testing, the latter, for example, to uncover gene patterns with mutational defects predictative or indicative of a disease or the susceptibility to the same--for example, many of the common polygenic diseases like heart disease, cancers, neuro-degenerative diseases, cystic fibrosis, Rb (retinoblastoma) and many others.
DNA diagnostic testing often involves successive heat-separating or denaturing of the DNA strand pairs in the presence of appropriate reaction primers to produce a purified and amplified quantity of the so-called gene exons to enable viewing and image analysis of the patterns--so called polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification of gene exons, followed by electrophoretic separation of the resulting fragments (preferably 2D--two dimensionally to provide separation on the basis of both size and basepair sequence pattern separation), and inspection and image analysis of the electorphoretic fragment separation pattern image to observe variations from normal separations and thereby detect mutational defects.
In protein analysis, also, electrophoretic separation has been employed.
Since the present invention is concerned with the total automation of such a testing process and thus the integration and improvement of the various technologies, steps, and apparatus there involved, it is first important to examine the background state of the art of these individual technologies steps and apparatus components.